★★★☆☆ I remember nothing but the bobbles and Brierson

Marooned in Realtime

Vernor Vinge

I read Marooned in Realtime eleven years ago (15-Oct-2011). I barely remember it. This is unusual. Usually when I read the publisher's blurb for a book, it is sufficient to recall some impression -- perhaps not of the plot, but of why I read it, whether I liked the book overall, what made the most vivid impressions... But here I have almost nothing. I remember the idea of bobbles -- spherical pockets of stasis that freeze their contents in time and protect them from any outside influence. This idea has shown up elsewhere in Science Fiction.

The character Will Brierson is a clever variation on an old time-travel trope -- the person out of time. He was a detective in the 21st century (which, when this book was published in 1986, was the not-so-distant future -- now of course it has caught up with us) when he got bobbled. He became famous after his bobbling because his son wrote a series of detective books with him as the hero. The upshot is that, when everyone comes out of their bobbles, Brierson is much more famous than he ever was in life, and people expect him to be a much better detective than he ever really was. He turns out to be a pretty good detective, which is fun.

And that's about all I got. I'm rating this three stars on the assumption that if it was an outstanding book I would probably remember it better. That's pretty thin, so take this rating with a grain of salt.

Amazon review

Goodreads review

Comments

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